Deribit General User Information
1. Introduction
Deribit derivatives exchange has 2 trading pages:
Below you can find general exchange information and rules. In the menu above you can go directly to the different sections with information about fees, futures trading, options trading and the api.
2. Fees
Futures orders which provide liquidity receive a rebate of 0.02%. Orders that take liquidity are charged a small fee of only 0.05%. The fee is calculated as a percentage of the underlying asset of the contract.
Deribit Perpetual
Maker Rebate: 0.025%
Taker Fee: 0.075%
Futures
Maker Rebate: 0.02%
Taker Fee: 0.05%
Options
Maker Fee: 0.04% of underlying or 0.0004BTC per option.
Taker Fee: 0.04% of underlying or 0.0004BTC per option.
Fees can never be higher than 20% of the price of the option. For example if an option is traded at 0.0001 BTC, the fee will be 0.00002 BTC (instead of 0.0004 BTC), thus 20% of 0.0001 BTC.
Extra liquidation fees: Liquidations are charged an extra 0.30% fee. Those extra fees are income for the insurance fund.
Delivery (settlement at expiration)
For deliveries (expiration) half the fees of taker orders are charged. Eg: 0.025% for Futures, and 0.02% for Options, where for options the fee can never be more than 20% of the value of the option.
Deposits and Withdrawals
Bitcoin deposits are credited after 1 confirmation on the network. We don’t charge fees for deposits. Withdrawals are processed instantly or after first next block if the balance in our hot wallet permits so. We keep only a small percentage of coins in hot storage, so there is a chance that your withdrawal cannot be processed immediately. If needed, once a day we replenish the balance of the hot wallet from cold storage.
Withdrawals: Variable fees. Withdrawal fees depend on the current state of the Bitcoin network. Please note that the fee charged to your account can differ from the actual fee being payed on the network. Sometimes withdrawals of more clients are combined in 1 transaction and amount of bytes needed on the blockchain can vary also depending on the current state of our hot wallet. So the actual fee payed to the network is unknown at the moment of requesting the withdrawal, but the fee being charged to your account will be already fixed. The algorithm that calculates fees is made in such way to break even on withdrawal fees over a longer period of time. Sometimes actual fees will be more than charged fees and sometimes they will be less.
Deposits: Free
Maker: a “maker” order is an order that adds liquidity to the order book. A maker order is an order that does not execute immediately but instead goes into the order book.
Taker: a “taker” order is an order that removes liquidity from the order book. A taker order is an order that will execute immediately against other orders upon submission to the exchange.
3. Matching Engine
Deribit exchange matching engine is based on “first come first serve” principle. Orders execute in price-time priority as received by the matching engine after passing risk engine checks.
The matching engine can process thousands of orders per second, and also hundreds of orders per second from a single account. This is not a luxury but a necessity for any modern options exchange where hundreds of assets need to be quoted in real time. The average latency in the matching engine and risk engine is on average 0.6 ms for an order. So usually within 0.6 ms after receiving an order, a confirmation message has been returned to the client. If an order executes immediately, an execution report will be included in this message.
Currently the matching engine accepts limit orders, market orders and stop limit orders. As well orders can be sent as hidden orders and post only orders.
The matching engine DOES NOT allow for self-trading. If an order is sent to the exchange that would execute immediately with an order from the same account in the order book, this order will be rejected. Note that the order will only be rejected if it would actually execute against another order in the same account. So an order overlapping with other orders in same account might still be accepted and executed if it would execute against other orders in the order book not from the same account.
Thanks to an average total latency for an order to pass risk engine and enter the order book via the matching engine of only 0.6 ms it is possible to send hundreds of orders per second from a single account.
4. Risk Engine
The risk engine is a vital part of any derivatives exchange. Deribit risk engine can assess thousands of incoming orders per second and hundreds of incoming orders per second from a single account. If the risk engine approves an order, the order will continue its way to the matching engine to get matched or enter the order book. Then a message is sent back to the client. This whole process takes on average less than 2 ms.
5. Deribit BTC Index
Currently the Deribit BTC index is made up the latest prices from Bitstamp, Gemini, Bitfinex, Itbit, Coinbase and Kraken. From those 6 exchanges Deribit retrieves continuously best bid and best ask prices and calculates the mid-price. Then the highest and lowest price are taken out. The remaining 4 exchanges are then each for 25% accountable for the BTC price index. So at all times there are a maximum of 4 exchanges making up the BTC price index weighting each 25%.
There is a page dedicated to the price index where you can see at any time which exchanges are actually part of the index at this very moment. Here: https://www.deribit.com/main#/prinx_chart or at BTC Futures > Index Chart.
If one or more of the feeds is not working or exchange(s) are disabled, the Deribit index would be calculated 3 out of 5, 2 out of 4 or 1 out of 3 leaving highest and lowest value out of the index. When there are just 2 active feeds, both will be for 50% part of the Index. If there is just a single feed, this single feed will be the index. If for some reason no single feed reaches Deribit, the platform will be temporarily locked (trading disabled) until connection is re-established with one of the exchanges.
Note: Currently Bitfinex is disabled and is not part of the Deribit Index.
6. Expiration Price
The price used for settlement and delivery of contracts will be calculated as the time-weighted average of the Deribit index over the last half hour before expiration. The Deribit index gets calculated every 6 seconds. So the final delivery price is the average of 300 index prices taken in the last 30 minutes before expiration.
7. Cross Margin
All funds held in an account will be considered as available margin. Equity, balances and margin will fluctuate as prices in in the market change. If the maintenance margin in an account is higher than margin balance in an account a margin call is triggered. A users position will be incrementally liquidated in small steps (12.5% of position size or minimum 500 contracts) until margin balance is higher than maintenance margin. Any unrealised profits are also immediately available as collateral for trading.
8. Auto Liquidation
Deribit is operating with an incremental auto-liquidation system. This means that as soon as an account does not have enough equity to maintain its positions, (as assessed by the risk engine) a small part of the position will be closed in the market. At this moment the liquidation orders sent to the market are up to 12.5% of your position or a minimum of 500 contracts of $10 each.
This happens in real time, such that positions in an account will be reduced immediately when maintenance margin is higher than the margin balance. As soon as maintenance margin is again lower than margin balance, liquidation will stop.
The system would first liquidate perpetual and futures positions and after that liquidate any short option positions, in such a way that the risk of the position will be reduced. (basically striving for a “delta neutral” position where possible). There are circumstances possible where options would get liquidated first, where options delta’s are bigger and opposite direction than all other delta’s on the platform. For normal margin accounts, long option positions can not get liquidated.
Autoliquidation for portfolio margin users works different. The liquidation algorithm would automatically only trade perpetual and futures contracts in an attempt to reduce the risk profile of your position (reducing the delta exposure of your position). This is under most circumstances the least hurtful way of reducing the risk profile of a position with portfolio margin. Automatically reducing options positions could be very hurtful and resulting in a cascading liquidation of whole position, due to the possibility of finding a very illiquid options market at the moment of liquidation. Any options positions of course can also get reduced, such liquidation trades would be done manually by Deribit Risk management.
During autoliquidation, a trader has no control over his account and cannot placed orders nor cancel orders created by the autoliquidation engine. A trader will get back control over his account once Maintenance Margin is brought back to a level lower than 100% of your margin balance or equity. This means that the reduction of your position, once maintenance margin is higher than 100%, is solely at the discretion of Deribit. The user cannot influence this process by placing additional closing orders.
9. Insurance Fund
Deribit has an insurance fund that should cover all losses of bankrupt traders. Due to our advanced real time incremental liquidation system, it will be actually a challenge to go bankrupt even if a trader would wish to do so. On the insurance page we will publish in real time any occurring bankruptcies and the last state of the insurance fund. As long as there is BTC in the insurance funds, withdrawals of funds (including (unrealized) profits of not expired assets are available for withdrawal immediately after settlement (future trades settle daily at 08.00 UTC). If the insurance fund gets depleted, any then occurring bankruptcies will be socialized among the winning traders, though our goal is to never get to that point, and margin requirements will be made more strict as soon as bankruptcies appear.
Insurance fund income:
Any liquidation orders are charged an extra 0.30% fee on top of the default transaction fees. The extra proceeds are added every hour to the insurance fund.
10. (Co)Location
Deribit exchange servers are located in OVH datacenter SBG1 in Strasbourg (France). Professional traders looking for lowest possible latency can rent a server in OVH datacenter in Strasbourg and have only 0.1ms latency to the matching engine of Deribit Exchange. We do not offer specific co-location services. The fastest connection can be obtained by renting a server in SBG1 datacenter from OVH. We do not offer direct cross-connects.
11. Test Server
On https://test.deribit.com the exchange is running in test mode with all functionality but not with real bitcoins. Internal “deribit” coins can be used to withdraw/deposit funds. New updates are also first tested on this server before they will be implemented in production, so the version you encounter on https://test.deribit.com can vary slightly from the production version.
For more information or direct trading go to:
For 24/7 support go to https://t.me/deribit
